Using categories to find geo related answers

[ka3jjz]

What is a wiki category? It's a structure that gathers articles that have common data on them - for example articles for a state that have fire tone out data. By policy, every article must belong to at least one category - but it can (and sometimes should) belong to more. The more categories to which the article belongs, the more it can be found by a tool (it's been there for years, but no one really knew about it) that I will mention in a moment.

But first, how can you find the categories that are defined for your state? That's a fair question, and unfortunately MediaWiki doesn't make that easy (but we did). Let's use my state as an example...

Maryland (US) - The RadioReference Wiki

wiki.radioreference.com

Go to the very bottom, and you will see 3 links there. These links call a tool that has been developed to dig into the categories area in a number of ways. The second one is usually the one most people will want to use. Practically every state (and some Canadian provinces) have this capability.

Now how do we use them? Let's say you want to find out how many wiki articles have MOTOTRBO information for your state. If you go to the main page, and look on the left under 'Collaboration', you will see a link for 'Collaboration Categories'. Because MediaWiki tends to bury this information, it's a little more work to get there, but it's easy if you follow a step by step approach.

1. Click on the 'Collaboration Categories' link
2. This takes you to the tool's front page. Since we are looking for MOTOTRBO information, that would show up in the Scanner Info area. Click on that link
3. You are taken to the Scanner Information section.
4. Click on DMR. You will then see a link for MOTOTRBO Information Click on this
5. Now click on United States MOTOTRBO Information
6. You are then presented with the states that have the MOTOTRBO category. Click on the desired state

There's another way to dig into this a bit faster. Since we know MOTOTRBO is a trunking type, you can go down when you hit the Scanner Information section to another section called Trunking. As you can see MOTOTRBO is there (just click on the desired country) and would be a faster way to get to your information (in fact I should change that target on the main page for this...). It's a bit sloppy simply because there's 2 types of DMR trunking - Tier III and the various MOTOTRBO types (which is big M's way of doing DMR trunking), so they have to be split a bit like this.

I can't stress this enough - putting in the correct category means that this tool would be able to find it. The updates are done very fast by the app, so if you change a category, it takes next to no time for it to be shifted.

We have a lot of categories in this tool, but more can be added. Play around with this and get comfortable using it. With over 10000 pages in the wiki, any additional indexing like this makes it easier to find information that might otherwise get buried in the mud

Mike